Though perhaps having fallen slightly out of favor in recent years, zombies have long been integral to the horror genre. After all, where would we be without the revolutionary Night of the Living Dead? The zombie shambled into our nightmares decades ago and continues to persist as an icon of horror.
I’ll admit, I’m not generally a huge fan of zombies. It’s just that, by and large, they’ve gotten stale. I never even finished The Walking Dead (or its 500 spinoff series). What I am a fan of is when someone can put a genuinely fresh spin on the zombie trope that makes the story they’re telling feel new.
These “fresh takes” often result in things that are not entirely zombies, but are semi-zombies, or zombie-like. Think of the infected of 28 Days Later. Not actually the undead, but still—zombies, for all intents and purposes. While a virus has become fairly standard for zombie origin stories, the 2010s saw a rise of the fungal zombie with The Last of Us and The Girl with All the Gifts, each offering creepy and engaging twists on the monsters in question.
But even if the zombie in the story is your classic reanimated undead, there are still ways to make it feel resonant in its perspective and ideas.
One of the more interesting zombie tales I’ve read recently is “The Old Swicheroo” in Christi Nogle’s brilliant collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future, which follows two survivors of the apocalypse. As it turns out, zombies don’t actually eat brains, but they do eat the rest of you—arms, legs, guts. The zombies may still be conscious, their brains uninfected. Maybe the myth had it backwards: if you eat a zombie brain, you’ll be immune. At least, that’s the idea…
Another fascinating story that explores the potentially retained consciousness of zombies is Zombie, Ohio by Scott Kenemore. He’s written a number of zombie novels, but the other one that takes these creatures in a new direction is Zombie-in-Chief: Eater of the Free World, a satire of the 2016 election with Trump as a zombie (to darkly hilarious effect).
All of this is to say that while I’m no zombie expert, I can appreciate a story willing to take an old dog and teach it some new tricks. Whether you love or hate zombies, there’s no denying their continued influence, even as they morph into new iterations. This month’s book recommendation brings us an outbreak story that blends classic tropes with fresh ideas. Let’s knock back a beverage and enjoy.
Cheers!
The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson
While I love quiet horror, atmospheric tales of haunting weirdness, and character-driven works, sometimes I just want to dive into a heart-pounding thrill ride, and The Loop certainly delivers. Endearing characters and a relentless pace make this an easy page-turner, and the “zombies,” if you’ll allow me to call them that, were just different enough to keep me interested in how exactly it would all play out.
There are two key parts to this book that I found deliciously creepy:
The first involves a party in some underground caves and a narrow passage that left me feeling very claustrophobic. The second involves a sort of cursed television broadcast that further highlighted the technological origin of the whole outbreak. I would have loved to explore this strange broadcast further, but alas, our characters had bigger fish to fry.
The book also presents some commentary on the social stratification of the town (with our protagonists being the misfits and underdogs, of course), but I also wish the book had more to say about these class barriers as well as the sinister presence of the company that created this outbreak… but we get just enough of these elements to lend a measure of depth to what is otherwise a gore-infested zombie tale—no, these aren’t the ravenous undead, but their modus operandi is similar enough to zombies to call them that.
Somehow, Johnson manages to weave a thread of hope into the book’s general nihilism, making it feel less dour than the hopelessness of the situation suggests, which is no small feat for a situation this bleak. The book manages to have a lot of fun with its premise and its characters, and that makes it an enjoyable and entertaining read!
The hands yanked her head upward and she was eye to eye with Ben Brumke. But he wasn’t altogether Ben Brumke anymore—in the glare of her headlamp she saw his eyes were bright blue, the irises blurred at the edges. Shiny black fluid had pooled near his shoulder and stained his polo shirt.
Pairs best with…
Blue Kamikaze Shot
This book needed something a bit wild for its pairing, so we’re doing shots! The violence the word “kamikaze” invokes reminds me of the ever-present violent danger of the book, and the shot’s blue color reflects the electric blue that the infected people’s eyes become.
Ingredients
1 oz chilled vodka
1 oz blue curacao
1/2 oz lime juice
Directions
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, and shake.
Strain into a tall shot glass / shooter glass. Just don’t get caught in a loop of drinking! Nobody likes a hangover.
Tips from a Writing Professor
You know what else is a loop?
Revision.
It’s a recursive, rather than a linear, process, and maybe that’s why so many people find it challenging.
One thing so many students don’t know how to do, struggle to do, or have never bothered to do, is revise. In all my classes, I have my students engage in some form of revision. In English 101, they do three full drafts of every paper: a Down Draft (a freewrite designed to get some words down on the page, even if they are a jumbled mess), a Feedback Draft (a more coherent version that they submit to me for feedback and to classmates for peer review), and a Final Draft (the graded one). For my creative writing class, students write four major pieces, one from each genre of study—a creative nonfiction essay, a short story, a poem, and a one-act play—and for their final portfolio, they must select one of these pieces to substantially revise based on feedback received from both me and their peers in the workshop.
Many of these students have never engaged in a drafting process before, or they have, but they didn’t get the point of it. Even my creative writing students, who are obviously interested in the craft of writing, often admit they dislike and generally avoid revision. Everyone seems to just want to spit out their work and then leave it alone. They sometimes say they worry that revising a piece will destroy the original passion and essence of it. What I try to tell them is that revising is how they can further explore and bring out that essence.
The final unit of that class is all about revision: why we do it, how we do it, and how revision is ultimately where the magic happens.
Revision is not the same thing as proofreading or line editing. Revision is, quite literally, re-visioning the piece of writing, seeing it anew.
I’m a weirdo, but I love revision—I often enjoy it more than writing the first draft. First drafts are ugly and never quite do what I want them to do, and as a perfectionist, I find that frustrating. Revision is where I can mold the piece into what it needs to be.
Revision has been on my mind because the novel I’m working on has gone through a wild process in which it’s been revised a ton of times before I’ve even quite reached the end of the manuscript. I’m now on what I hope is the final write/re-write before I finish-finish it. By the time the “first draft” is done, it’ll have been revised a bunch of times already.
I also have a ton of notes sitting in my Scrivener project for this book, most of which are about the book itself, but some of which are little reminders about writing in general. Here’s one I just found that offers one way to think about what different drafts of a piece can accomplish:
First Draft: This is what I mean to say.
Second Draft: And now I will make the story say what I mean.
In a first draft, things can be clunky and a bit obvious, because you’re telling the story to yourself and thus also working out, and explaining to yourself, what it all means. You’re trying to figure out what you want to say. In a second draft, we can take out things that are too obvious and aim for more subtlety, and rather than trying to figure out what we want to say—because we already know at this point—we can mold the piece to now say what we mean.
Maybe that little play on words doesn’t make sense or doesn’t work for you. Something about it made sense to me, which is why I thought I’d share it here for anyone interested in the ways we might think about different drafts of a piece of writing.
Writing Update
If you read last month’s issue of Books & Booze, then you know I had a number of stories come out in July. I’ve gotten my contributor copies for all the anthologies, and they are gorgeous!
As for now, I’m desperately clinging to the remainder of summer as I try to finish by current book before the semester starts in two weeks.
I’m also looking forward to the paperback release of When the Night Bells Ring, which will be out this October! In the meantime, you can pre-order the paperback here. If you were thinking about getting the paperback when it comes out, please consider pre-ordering now, as pre-orders are immensely helpful for writers!
About Me
Jo Kaplan is the author of the horror novels It Will Just Be Us and When the Night Bells Ring. Her short stories have appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Horror Library, Nightscript, and a variety of award-nominated anthologies (sometimes as Joanna Parypinski). Find her at jo-kaplan.com.